Monday, May 19, 2008

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

4 comments:

I'm surprised the Sci-Fi Channel hasn't produced a low budget BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS PART II. Speaking of the Sci-Fi Channel, NY Times has an interesting article about them in today's issue. I have to agree with Mr. Capobianco's quoted statement that a "lot of" (I'd say 95 percent of) what they show is dumbed-down or watered-down SF. I'm not an exacting purist on the matter (my first and still favorite SF writer was Edgar Rice Burroughs), but the cheap CGI creature movies and "Ghost Hunters" (although my wife likes it) are pretty much a lowest common denominator.

Fred, I agree. They really dumbed down Flash Gordon, an idea that was already pretty old-school SF. Done right, it would have been fun to watch.But they threw out all the fun stuff and tossed in things they thought would be relevant to the younger folks, I suppose. I knew it was a lost cause when Ming The Merciless showed just a wee bit of mercy(shudder) in about the third episode.

The very fact it was the Skiffy Channel kinda doomed it. Fear.Net and its On-Demand channel is similarly uninspiring. I understand the Monsters HD channel on Voom was pretty good (mostly from Tim Lucas's raves in VIDEO WATCHDOG), so of course DishNetwork is dropping it and the other Voom channels for running "too much obscure programming," not the real good stuff like endless repeats of the SCREAM films.

For me, the measure of Skiffy was offering THRILLER, a genunine service, then erratically scheduling the same twelve episodes over and over at 3am on Saturday mornings when they remembered to do so. Before they became the reliable home for CARNOSAUR 19: EVEN WE CAN'T PRETEND TO CARE.